Dear Friends and Clientele,

Welcome to our second newsletter. As I hinted in the concluding remarks of our first newsletter, I would like to share with you an exciting discovery that came to light when I was browsing through some Art and Antiques books at the famous English bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris last October. I will spare you all the suspense now so that you will not all jump to the end of the newsletter to find out like I do when I am reading a “who done it” novel.

The book I was thumbing through in Paris was about the history, decorative arts and furnishings in the English Embassy in Paris. The embassy is of course not accessible to the public and having walked past and admired its magnificence a million times I always wondered what it is like inside. Somehow I thought it would be furnished totally in the English manner especially with Regency pieces to intentionally irk the French, but no...the Embassy is almost exclusively regaled with a treasure trove of period French Empire pieces including a collection of eight clocks. Herein lies the connection. There are two identical clocks as the ones in the Embassy presently featured Three Centuries but before I tell you more about them please bear with me and endure a brief history lesson.

The clocks in the British Embassy in Paris are part of a remarkable collection of furniture, ornaments, table decorations, candelabra and chandeliers, mostly in the Empire style. The British Government acquired the property located on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore arguably the world’s choicest address in 1814, from Pauline Bonaparte-Borghese. Pauline was Napoleon’s sister and was married to the Neapolitan Prince Borghese. Napoleon bought the house for her as a second residence to her palace in Naples in 1803.

When Napoleon abdicated on 4th April 1814, and sensing that the value of her brand was about to tank, she instructed her agent in Paris...yes they had real estate agents then too...to sell her house on Fauboug St Honore along with chattels that could not be sent out to her in Naples. She rightly foresaw that all Bonaparte property in France would be confiscated and by restored to Bourbon dynasty. Fortunately for Princess Borghese and the British people, the Duke of Wellington, his military career apparently terminated with the downfall of the empire, had accepted the post of Ambassador to France and was looking for a suitable residence. When, on arrival in Paris in August 1814, he was told that Princes Borghese’s house just came on the market, he snapped it up and promptly moved in...lock, stock “clocks” and barrel.

Except for some of the table settings, notably a great gilt-bronze table centre piece, one of several which Napoleon gave as presents to his mother, sisters, and a few of his marshals, the vast majority of the ornaments, notably the chandeliers, candelabra and table decorations listed in the 1814 inventory when Pauline ceded ownership of the house to the Duke are still on display in the Embassy today.

Why did Pauline choose to adorn her house almost exclusively in the French Empire style? The simple answer of course is that she wanted a totally contemporary look and in the first quarter of the 19 century, the French Empire style was all the rage. Another esoteric reason however may have been that she had no choice. She couldn’t emulate Marie Antoinette and go for the Louis style, now could she... not while the guillotine was still parked at the Bastille. So Pauline’s interior decorator must have been given two themes two work with...... French Empire and French Empire...

The French Empire was a product of the French revolution. The revolution not only produced profound political and social changes in France but also an indelible mark on style and taste. Right after the revolution when the mere hint of affluence was fraught with risk, there was no demand for fine ornaments, and many masterpieces of the Louis period, like the Royal table services at Versailles, were melted down and converted into money to pay for services rendered by the masses. When the Revolution had expended itself a revival inevitably occurred, and by the time Napoleon became ruler of France the natural currents of French taste and artistic genius began to reassert themselves. There was however an urge to be modern, to devise new themes of decoration and to find them in the exploits of the New France. The character of the Imperial Court, with its taste for Roman and more particularly the new archeological discoveries of Pompeii, set the general tone for the direction of the Empire style.

Ironically and despite the destruction he inflicted on the cultures of France and everywhere else in Europe, Napoleon himself personally encouraged revival of the fine arts. He wanted to replenish the Royal residences depleted by the depredations of the Revolution, to invest his palaces with magnificence for the prestige of the dynasty, and to maintain a traditional French industry.

Reflecting Napoleon’s admiration and sadly Hitler’s a century later... for the ancient Empires of Greece and Rome, the dominant inspirational elements of French Empire style draw heavily from Greek mythology and Roman history. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign and the symbols of that ancient culture including sphinxes, pyramids, obelisks, snakes, acanthus leaves and so on were also a source of a huge influence on the Empire style.

The eight Empire clocks in the Embassy now adorn mantels in various rooms. Some of the rooms such as Salon Jaune (yellow room), salon Ionique (Ionian salon ..presumably referring to neo-classical features in the salon) , the Salon Vert ( Green room) etc have retained the names given to them by Pauline. Others such as the Wellington Room and the library were obviously named by the new English masters of the house.

The two clocks at Three Centuries occupy two of the more important spaces in the Embassy.

The first is an allegory of Theseus and Hippolytus’ located in the Library. The clock is made of bronze, with figures and decorations of gilt-bronze, on a double plinth of dark-red marble.

It depicts Theseus, seated on a throne, questioning Hippolytus about his incestuous relations with Phaedra with Hippolytus protesting his innocence and his hound looking on trustingly up at him. Theseus, disbelieving his son, arranged for his father Poseidon to destroy the young man as he drove himself home from Athens in his chariot along the Gulf of Corinth. The scene, showing Hippolytus entangled in the wreck of his chariot while a sea monster assails him with gusts of smoky flames is graphically depicted in relief in the chased and gilt panel on the upper plinth.

The second clock is a personal long time favorite of mine and has been in my collection since 1976. It is Student and the Sciences clock installed in Wellington Room. I acquired the clock in Geneva New York and until I amalgamated my personal collection with the inventory in the gallery in 2007, it always graced my home.

This clock depicts a draped female figure (in dark-bronze) leaning in contemplation on a draped pedestal (in gilt-bronze) in which the clock is set. Her right hand holds a scroll, while her left elbow is placed on a pile of three books. A rooster below the dial and the two torches which flank it represent medical learning. The gilt-bronze frieze inset in the face of the marble plinth portrays a group of children studying the sciences and the arts of drawing and sculpture.

I should mention that the clocks at Three Centuries are not copies of the ones in the Embassy. They are exactly the same, meaning they were produced by a particular maker at the same time from the same castings that original sand mold model came from. Both clocks are early models and given that her brother was buying, all Pauline had to do was point and voila she could have whatever clock she wanted. So what she chose for her house must have been pretty special. To my knowledge there are no known records of how many castings of a particular empire clock were ever made. So there is no way of knowing how many others still exist. The occupational health implications of the gilding which at that time involved a lot of intimate contact with mercury, the rare craftsmanship required for the chiseling of the finer details on many of these clocks after casting, the exorbitant cost of these clocks at the time, the popularity of a particular model, plus of course the relatively short tenure of the Empire Period which barely lasted 20 years all had an influence on how many of these clocks were produced. If I had to guess, a run of a hundred clocks of the same model would have been considered mass production at the time. I suspect that most runs would have been much smaller than that. If I can use my odd forty years of hunting for Empire wherever I travelled as a benchmark, I can probably recall coming across three of the Theseus and Hippolytius models. One is on permanent display at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The other two were in Paris including one at the venerable antique clock institution in Paris Le Pendularie, located a stone’s throw from the Embassy on Rue Faubourg St Honore. Of the Student and the Sciences clock I may have seen five, one in London and the others all in shops in Paris.

So there you have it. For continuity of the subject, our next newsletter will carry on in the same vein as this one, only the venue is Spain and the period a little later than the French Empire. Newsletter Number Four will recount a connection between Three Centuries and the Luftwaffe. So stay tuned.